Some other energy sources to exploit may be;
tidal, geo thermal & solar thermal.
We have alot of potential to cut down on waste too.
Too often the debate is reduced to solar vs burning shit.
LINKS TO COLUMNS: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/3000/followup-why-dont-we-ditch-nukes-em-and-em-coal and http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2988/is-nuclear-power-safe
I think this artice missed the real point! This planet cannot support nine billion people! The fact is it is already over populated by about 40%. We need to target population control. I believe that if we don’t start very soon then mother nature will do it for us and in a way we don’t like.
I suggest you read Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air by David J C MacKay. The whole book is available online or can be downloaded for free.
http://www.withouthotair.com/Contents.html
He actually does the math for various forms of energy. Without understanding the actual numbers, I don’t an intelligent discussion of energy is possible.
How do you get that figure? It seems to me that the fact that there are seven billion people on the planet, and we’re all still alive, is evidence that seven billion isn’t “over populated”.
Haikus are easy.
But sometimes they don’t make sense.
Refrigerator.
There is a difference, of course, between what the resources of the planet can sustain for a period of time, and what can be sustained with terrestrial resources indefinitely. The evaluations in Limits To Growth are actually pretty accurate and in line with the predictions made based upon linear extrapolations of food production and natural resources when it was written in 1972. Although the book and the principles within it have largely been derided or ignored by critics (particularly self-identified political conservatives) the fact is that without unforeseen efficiencies and improved crop yields that were beyond predictions, the world would be incapable of sustaining the current population.
The current apparent limit isn’t crop yields, metals, industrial capacity, or even petroleum energy, but fresh potable water for drinking and irrigation. A substantial portion of current agriculture is dependent upon non-sustainable “fossil water” sources, and unlike energy or agriculture, there isn’t a good way to effectively switch to another medium or source for fresh water for inland agriculture and industry. We may very well be over the sustainable population limit for available potable water and are simply running subsisting off of a very finite resource.
Stranger
Welcome to the Straight Dope Message Boards, Hattiephant, we’re glad to have you with us. When you start a thread, it’s helpful to other readers to provide a link to the column(s) you’re talking about. Saves searching time and helps keep us on the same page. I assume you meant the two recent columns about energy, so I’ve added a link to the bottom of your post. (If I got it wrong, please email me and I’ll fix it.)
No biggie, you’ll know for next time. And, as I say, welcome!
A plan, a plan! Tis what we need!
An idea, An Idea! It’s time transcended!
Ho! cries the weakened man.
I have ideas, but, they don’t work!
Best wishes,
hh
This is assuming, of course, that crops need to be grown in those places dependent on fossil water, rather than imported from places that can sustain agriculture long-term. But I’m not very familiar with this fossil water issue, so I can’t say how much that would help.
First I would like to point out that the improvements mentioned were only unforeseen by the authors of Limits To Growth and you seem to be repeating their mistakes. Second potable water means water suitable for drinking, which is a tiny part of the water used in the United States. Most water used in the United States is for agricultural and industrial purposes. Third the total water used in the United States has actually decreased since 1980. It has decreased from 440 billion gallons per day to 410 billion gallons. Farmers produce 70% more food while using 15% less water.
http://www.fastcompany.com/1748537/the-big-thirst-the-secret-revolution-in-us-water-use
Meanwhile we developing new plants that use much less water than our current crops and also crops that don’t require fresh water or that use sewage as input.
I think in the future that major crops will be various kinds of algae which can grow in salt water rather than fresh water.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algae#Uses
There are some communities that have outstripped their local water supplies or are having droughts and third world countries that don’t have the infrastructure to purify water for local consumption. What we are not having is a global water crisis.
I interviewed Nobel Economics Laureate Simon Kuznets about the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth in 1972. His comment was succinct: they are ignoring technological change. Malthus thought “sustainable” meant under a billion people. People keep dragging him out as if he had proven right. At present, should we live at the density of Mumbai, we could put the entire population of the world in Arizona.
As for energy requirements, those, too are elastic. Put people in a ranch house with an SUV, and consumption rises. Put them in a well-insulated multi-story apartment building and body heat may be enough to keep it warm as they work via the Internet. Or, on $2.50 a day in 2050, they may not be able to afford much energy, and therefore will make do with what they can afford.
Predicting the future is entertaining. Doing it well is rare – so unless someone has a track record, I’d be cautious about paying too much attention.
I prefer to say that if we lived at the population density of Manhattan, then everyone in the United States would fit in New Jersey. You can have high population density and a high standard of living.
One of my favorite books is Oath of Fealty by Larry Nivens and Jerry Pournelle.
How much agriculture (aside from cranberries and peat moss) and natural resources are grown or developed in New Jersey? New Jersey is a highly industrial (and more recently, post-industrial) state that is heavily dependent upon importing resources. If the world’s land masses were as densely populated as northeastern New Jersey there would be no room for agriculture anywhere.
I think very highly of Dr. Pournelle for his efforts in space advocacy and in particular the development of single stage to orbit vehicles, but I find his literary talent somewhat lacking, and think that both he and Niven (or at least, in collaboration) tend to draft their stories and characters so as to pedantically illustrate and enforce their strongly libertarian leanings, often to the detriment of both storytelling and realism.
Despite the fact that you quoted my entire post, you don’t appear to have read it very thoroughly. I did not say that we are in a water crisis; what I wrote is that we may be outstripping the usage of available fresh water supplies. I did use “potable” as a shorthand for all drinkable, irrigation, and industrial use of water; the reason for that is that with few exceptions, when groundwater is used, potable water is used for all purposes without distinction. In a few areas where water has become scarce and expensive, the use of non-potable greywater is used for irrigation and (some) industrial use, but this is not uniformly true. Also, there is something wrong with your matbh: 410 is 93% (7% less) water, not 15% less. Yields have improved, primarily due to better crop rotation practices and modern pesticides, but in general, save for agriculture in Arizona and California there is little drive to use less water. In areas and with crops in which surface water or seasonally-recharged groundwater supplies from wetlands and natural reservoirs the necessary water for irrigation this is not an issue, but with groundwater that is not replenished on a seasonal basis it makes water a finite resource.
As for Limits To Growth, I have to question whether the critics here have even read it. It does not make specific future predictions, except as examples. Instead, it presents a method of evaluating future resource limitations, based upon current knowledge about resource availability and usage. The authors are very candid about not being able to predict resource development and technological change that may alter resource usage. Nonetheless, the central thesis–that natural resources that are not replenished are ultimately non-sustainable–is scarcely even debatable, despite attempts at handwaving to the contrary. What is debatable is usage levels versus known resources, and questionable and often subjective prognostications regarding future technology that will replace or replenish that resource in an economical and sustainable manner. The smart course is to treat resources as being limited to what we know of their availability and plan accordingly.
Stranger
Why do all our energy questions have to assume that we’re going to keeping on using vastly more energy than the planet can produce without dire consequences? Maybe we’re just going to have to learn to use less power and quit being such selfish hogs.
Because most predictions don’t assume that humanity is going to give up the standard of living we have achieved in the West. They are baselining the rest of the developing world achieving various benchmarks that approach our standard of living.
If you can project real means of maintaining similar standards of living while reducing consumption, then you have a valid means to assume people start using less power. But just assuming that Americans are going to stop using automobiles, cell phones, televisions, computers, air conditioning, etc and start farming for a living is preposterous without some major catastrophic event. And assuming China is not going to continue to develop this standard of living is ridiculously naive.
I wasn’t implying that the rest of the US would become wilderness. You said that our current population isn’t sustainable, while I’m saying that 10 billion is sustainable with predictable improvements in technology.
This is incorrect. Most fresh water consumption is directly pumped from directly from the rivers or lakes or wells without any purification.
410 was a reference to total water consumption, not agricultural use, which was in a different sentence.
Are far as I can tell this doesn’t disagree with anything I said.
Why would we read a document that was already invalidated by subsequent events? Your own statements show that it wasn’t intended to be realistic predictions, but it was GIGO computer model that was pretending to be scientific, when it actually just being used to drive a political agenda. They didn’t intend for anybody to read the document, just the press releases.
Ah, I understand your position now. Why bother read something you intend to criticize, especially if it may contain information or ideas that are contrary to your assertions. That explains why your responses to my points are so tangential or diversionary; you didn’t actually bother to read them. In that case, please continue with your fact-free debate.
Stranger
Everyone says this, but nobody is willing to say how many they’re willing to kill in order to achieve it. How many people living on respirators, or dependent upon drugs that require significant energy outlays to produce or, in general, people who are high-maintenance for medical reasons should we kill in order to achieve the goal of getting everyone’s energy consumption down to sustainable levels?
Because most rational people who make predictions don’t think the world is going to end and we’ll all go back to being hunters and gatherers. The 1st world isn’t going to collapse back into some sort of bucolic 3rd world utopia (since that concept doesn’t exist except in the minds of a few), instead the 3rd world is going to increasingly demand more energy. This is already happening. So, the trick is going to be to find it, not wish that the whole world would stop being ‘selfish hogs’. That was pretty much the point of Cecil’s article…realistically, how do we increase our energy production in the face of rising world wide demand and the assumption that the entire world is not going to collapse back to the energy needs of the 18th century.
-XT
Limits to Growth (I think I still have it, and a critique published 2 years later, in the pile of boxes downstairs…) deliberately ignored technical progress and substitution.
A Toyota Camry hybrid, micromanaging energy consumption and using electricity to augment acceleration and regenerative braking, can consistently get almost highway mileage in stop-and-go traffic. LED and CFL bulbs use less than 1/4 the energy of incandescents. A modern LED flatscreen TV uses so little energy compared to old TVs it’s cool to the touch. An R2000 home is insulated enough to use significantly less heating or cooling.
Then there’s appropriate tech. When gas gets really expensive, people will switch from SUVs to smaller vehicles. You should see some of the ludicrously small urban vehicles in europe - the Smart car is one of the bigger ones, and even Ford makes a “Ka” half the size of what we drive here.
Finally, there’s substitution - not just cheaper, lighter, simpler materials for rare and expensive ones; but when people really want to take transit, transit service will improve. In Manhattan, it makes no sense to drive unless you have a reserved parking spot at the other end. Hundreds of thousands use commuter rail rather than freeways already. If the tech to get you A to B is almost as fast and convenient as a car, people will use it.
This ignores pie-in-the-sky ideas like telecommuting, where communication substitutes for transportation; but video-conference is already making a big dent in some business travel, besides being so cheap that many more people can participate in meetings and they can happen more frequently. (Whether meetings=productivity is a separate debate). I know in the IT support field, remote connectivity is immensly useful as a substitute for physical presence in managing equipment like routers and servers. Even Netflix as a substitute for driving to the Blockbuster where all those DVD’s were trucked in… energy savings! Heck, microwave as a substitute for ovens in many cooking chores.
So we could live in well-insulated houses to cut heating and cooling, use various tricks to minimize energy needed for lighting, travel, entertainment, and other household tasks. How much energy do we really need for a moderately good modern North American lifestyle?